It has been a struggle for the past year, trying to get the Germans onboard with us here on the State side. We’ve been unable to have any input with the software. Nothing has been open source.

While the DMR + and other associated products have been essential in the building blocks of our network, it is with the realization that the Brandmeister has far surpassed what we have accomplished within our own network.

As of today, I have been notified by the good folks at PI1SPA (VERON Amersfoort) that Hans and Torston will no longer be working on the Hytera Project DMR+ and will only facilitate bugs when necessary.

This leaves us with only 3 choices.

1. We continue using the network and hope to continue to grow it and hopefully nothing breaks.

2. We move quickly to the Brandmeister Network.

3. We break out our old software and try and develop our own Network again.

My personal opinion, is we move to the Brandmeister network, since it’s already built and there are many benefits to the new system.

Benefits of Brandmeister:

Allows the use of Motorola, Hytera, and Homebrew DMR systems on a single
network.
Allows the use of a DV4Minis and other Dongles to access ANY talkgroup,
not just reflectors.
Allows communication with DStar reflectors.
Allows for custom applications to query weather, user information, etc
via SMS.
Allows private calls across the entire network.
Allows SMS across the entire network.
Allows template based configuration of static talk groups.
Allows dynamic (PTT) access to all talk groups across the network.
Support for location based services for Motorola and Hytera radios with
GPS (APRS)

Downside:

Less network activity, meaning less repeaters until people learn of it,
test it, and make the decision to move to it. Many of us use our local
talk groups primarily so I don’t consider this a huge loss.

The 3109X in the list below is determined based on the calling area the repeater ID is assigned from. For example If a California repeater joins it will get assigned 31096 as it is in calling area 6 or if a repeater from Florida joins, it will get assigned 31094 as it is in calling area 4.

You can look at the pages of other countries to determine their talk groups, including foreign language groups, as all of those are available dynamically meaning that if you key up that talk group traffic from it will be sent to your repeater for 15 minutes.

I personally have no issues with using “Teamviewer” and logging in to someones system to update their repeaters if needed, just contact me at aaronelekes@gmail.com (N5VAE)

If you have ANY questions, please feel free to contact either Robert or Aaron.